A Flash of Green Page 5

  But somehow having Frosty do it made it less palatable. She did not like Frosty, or Frosty’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jigger, or the twelve-year-old sister, Debbie Louise. They were all superbly healthy, beautifully coordinated children, pale blonds with dark-blue eyes. Toward all adults they exhibited a watchful, impenetrable politeness which somehow had a false flavor, as though it were a mask for a contemptuous amusement. More than any other teenagers she knew, they seemed to confirm the assumption of the marketing experts that this was a new and separate race, a special people with only limited contact with the adult world.

  It seemed too simple, somehow, to say they were spoiled. There had always been the pocket money in whatever quantity they seemed to need, and the use of the family charge accounts. Burt Lesser certainly imposed no disciplines on them. He was a big soft balding man with such mild indefinite features that he could be caricatured by drawing an egg and putting heavy black glasses frames on it. He dressed more formally than most of the businessmen in Palm City. He had a loud methodical baritone laugh which he used either too soon or too late, and generally too often. Burt had obtained his realtor’s license soon after they had moved down from Wisconsin, fifteen years ago, the same year Sally Ann had received the final and most massive installment on her inheritance. Through a sweaty, earnest, fumbling diligence he had managed to do quite well at the trade. And Sally Ann had done well too, by buying in her own name those investment bargains which came up from time to time. Burt was an active workhorse member of a wide range of civic organizations.

  There were those who said you just had to admire ol’ Burt for the way he gets out and digs when, as far as the money is concerned, he could lay right back and take it easy.

  But one night, on the Lessers’ patio, while Van was still alive, Sally Ann, at one of the rare times when she was conspicuously in her cups, had given what was probably an accurate explanation. Somebody had been kidding Burt, asking him when he was going to retire. “Retire, for chrissake!” Sally Ann had roared. “As long as he can walk and talk, he’s going to have an office to go to. I told him when I married him he wasn’t going to clutter up the house all day long. That was the deal. It would drive me nuts having him around here trying to wait on me so he could feel useful.” Burt had laughed, but it had been a hollow effort.

  On reflection it seemed to Kat that Burt Lesser was an unlikely person to be heading up this new Palmland Development Company. He did not seem sufficiently directed, or properly ruthless. But he was well known and his reputation was good.

  She was in bed by eleven-thirty. After she turned her light out, she stared wide-eyed into the darkness and kept trying new positions, hoping to find one which would relax her. When it was quarter after twelve by her bedside clock she gave up and took one of the green capsules Ray Coplon had prescribed for her. In a little while the familiar feeling of the drug began. The black world began to expand, moving out and back and away from her, leaving her smaller and smaller and smaller in an enormous bed—small and silky and dwindling away.

  Four

  IT WAS NINE-THIRTY when Jimmy Wing arrived at the home of County Commissioner Elmo Bliss, three miles east of the city line, out on the Lemon Ridge Road. It was a huge old frame house, and Elmo had put a lot of money into modernization over the past few years. The house, and how he had acquired it, had become part of the legend, and had suffered distortions as had most other parts of the legend.

  Jimmy Wing often caught himself in the act of exaggerating the man’s past. Elmo had that inexplicable capacity to seem just a little more thoroughly alive than anyone else. Now, in his early forties, he looked like a leaner and younger version of Jimmy Hoffa, but with a roan-brown brush cut, and that tough sallow cracker skin the sun can’t mark, and eyes of a clear pale dangerous gray. He had Hoffa’s abrupt charm, his uncomical arrogance, and the same air of absolute certainty, diluted not at all by the back-country drawl, a lazier way of moving. In the past few years Elmo had settled on the kind of clothing he would wear for all except the most formal occasions. He wore slacks and sports shirts in plain colors, in dull hues of gray, blue and green, all in an understated western cut, along with pale hats which were never quite ranch hats, but gave a subtle outdoor-man impression.

  Jimmy Wing knew the bare outlines of the story, and it always pleased him to be able to add little incidents which had the flavor of truth. He came from a large clan noted over the years for the frequency of their trouble with the law, as well as a casual inbreeding which did the stock no good. Poachers, commercial fishermen, guides, ’gator hunters, brawlers. But Elmo was the one who became an All-State wingback, and picked the best deal out of all the scholarship offers and went on to Georgia. When Jimmy had begun senior high, Elmo had been gone three years, but the legends still circulated in the high school.

  Elmo lasted two years at Georgia before he was thrown out. He came back with a big red convertible and money in his pocket. The sheriff at that time had been Pete Nambo, a solemn brutal man who believed that a Bliss was a Bliss, no matter how many times one of them had had his name on the sports page.

  When Elmo didn’t have enough money left to pay his fine when Nambo arrested him the third time, the sentence was ninety days. Nambo put Bliss right onto one of the county road gangs, swinging a brush hook right through the heat of summer, living on beans, side meat and chicory coffee. And each evening, after the truck brought them back, if Nambo felt like it and had the energy, he’d have two deputies bring Elmo to him and he would work him over in an attempt to break him and make him beg. Nambo had learned he could break on the average of one out of every three Blisses he could give his personal attention to, and he had to find out which variety he had available this time. Not one of Elmo’s avid fans from the old days came to his rescue.

  When Elmo was released it was an even-money bet around town as to whether he’d take off for some friendlier place, or stay around and get into more trouble. But he sold his red car and apparently tucked the money away, and went to work as a rough carpenter. He kept his mouth shut, stayed out of bars, and ceased to be an object of any public interest. It wasn’t long before he became construction foreman for old Will Maroney. Then he made some sort of complicated deal whereby he took a spec house off Will’s hands. After he dressed it up and sold it quickly, the little firm became Maroney and Bliss. They tackled a bigger job than Will had ever attempted alone, and when they had made out well on it, suddenly Elmo broke with Maroney and went ahead on his own, calling himself The Bliss Construction Company (“Live in a Home of Bliss”), and Will Maroney went around town cursing Elmo for having walked off with the four top men out of his work crew, men who had been with him for many years.

  The wise businessmen of Palm City said that Elmo was going to fold any minute, and all his creditors were going to take a beating. They said he was moving too fast, buying too many vehicles and too much equipment, taking on too many jobs, expanding his work crews too fast, doing too much damn-fool advertising.

  But he didn’t fold. As soon as it was obvious to him, as it would soon be obvious to the rest of the community, that he was over the hump and in the clear, he married one of the Boushant girls, Dellie, the next to the youngest. There were seven of them. Felicia, Margo, Ceil, Belle, Frannie, Dellie and Tish. They had all been born and raised in the big house out on Lemon Ridge Road. Their father had been a carnival concessionaire, their mother—until she got too heavy too young—a wire walker.

  Not one of the seven girls could have been called a beauty, but they were uniformly attractive, all with vivacity, humor, their own brand of pride, and a good sense of style. They were affectionate, amorous, fun-loving, warm-blooded girls, and perhaps because there were so many of them, their reputation was a little more florid than their deeds warranted. Over the years of their girlhood, a thousand different cars must have turned in at that dusty driveway to pick one or the other of them up.

  One by one, starting at the top, they eventually married, soundly but no
t advantageously, married sober, reliable electricians, delivery men, mechanics, and began at once to bear them healthy lively children.

  In high school and during college vacations Elmo had dated several of the Boushant girls, and at the time of his marriage one of the sniggering jokes around town was that he had sampled every one of them and settled for the one with the most talent. Jimmy Wing suspected this was a partial truth. Elmo would have been too young for Felicia, and possibly too young for Margo. And too old for Tish. But a judicious weighing of all the factors of opportunity and inclination made it reasonable to assume Elmo Bliss had enjoyed three of his wife’s elder sisters. He had gone with Ceil for a little while when he was in high school, and been seen often with Belle during the first summer of college, and had been dating Frannie at the time Sheriff Pete Nambo locked him up.

  Also, Jimmy could remember the tone and expression of awe with which a local rancher had once described to him the young manhood of Elmo Bliss: “There was three or four of them, Elmo the leader, roarin’ up and down this coast a hundred miles an hour any night of the week, all over Collier, Lee and Charlotte Counties, as well as Palm County, and inland to Hendry and Glades. I tried to run with them for a while there, but it like to wore me down. That Elmo, he’d do any damn thing come into his head. I’d say you could count on two fights a night anyway, and you could sure count on women because that’s what Elmo was mostly hunting for. Lord God, the women! I’m telling you, Jimmy, he could find them where they wasn’t. Schoolgirls, tourist ladies, waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers, all kind of shapes and sizes and ages, and we’d bundle them into the cars and go off, slamming down them little back roads, singin’, drinkin’, the girls squealin’, and it seemed like we couldn’t be anyplace in six counties where Elmo didn’t know someplace nearby where we could take them. Anything warm, breathing and with a skirt on, Elmo seemed to get it without anywhere near the amount of fuss you’d expect.”

  So when Elmo married Dellie Boushant, and moved out to the big old house on the Lemon Ridge Road, the people decided he was settling for a smaller future than some had begun to predict for him. He would be just another of the men who had married Boushant girls. Many of the successful men in Palm County had, in times past, dated one or another of the Boushant girls, but successful men had not married them.

  So Elmo had married Dellie and moved out into the old house, and she had begun the bearing of his children; there were six of them now, ranging from thirteen down to two. Nowadays people pointed to Elmo’s marriage to Dellie as part of his luck and part of his success. Either the times had changed, or Elmo had changed them to suit himself.

  Jimmy knew the story of how Elmo had acquired the big house and the sixty acres around it, and he suspected it was true. After Elmo had been married to Dellie a little over two years—she was twenty then and he was eight years older—Mama Boushant had dropped dead in her own kitchen, willing equal shares in the house and land to her seven daughters. Elmo was overextended at the time, so nobody knew quite how he managed it. At the conference there were thirteen of them at the huge dining room table, six daughters, six husbands and Tish, the unmarried one. They say Elmo let the arguments run on for an hour before he took the money out of his pocket, ninety bills, one hundred dollars each. As he started counting it into six separate piles, fifteen bills in each pile, the angry talk died away and for most of the counting there was a complete silence. Elmo said, “You sign the release, and then you pick up the money, in that order. If there’s just one who won’t sign, the deal is off for the rest of you.”

  Steve Lupak, Belle’s husband, put up the biggest argument, saying the land was worth an absolute minimum of two hundred an acre, which would bring it up to twelve thousand even without the house. That started the rest of them off. Elmo leaned back with his eyes half closed, almost smiling, refusing to answer any of them. They appealed to Dellie, trying to make her admit it was unfair. But she sat close beside Elmo, placid and loving and heavy with her second child, the one who would be named Annabelle. By eleven Belle and Felicia were the only holdouts. By midnight Belle and Steve still fought it. By half past midnight they too gave up, and it was Elmo’s house from then on.

  Jimmy Wing had talked about that arrangement with Frannie Boushant a little over two years ago. Frannie Vernon, her name was at that time. It had come about in an unplanned way. He had known her in high school—she was two classes behind him—but had never dated her. He ran into her by accident in Miami. Borklund had sent him over to cover a Citrus Commission hearing. He had driven over, and when the hearing had been adjourned at four, he had phoned his story in and had been advised by Borklund that he might as well stay over and cover the session scheduled for the following day.

  As he was walking toward his car he met Frannie on the sidewalk. It was a cool day. She wore a short cloth coat over a dark wool skirt and white angora sweater. There was such a family resemblance between the sisters, he did not know if she was Ceil, Belle or Frannie when she smiled warmly at him and greeted him by name. She detected his slight hesitation and said, “I’m Frannie, Jim.”

  They moved out of the pedestrian traffic, over toward the store fronts to talk. Like all the Boushant girls, she was dark, with high cheekbones, a long oval face, pretty eyes of deep brown, a heavy mouth which smiled readily, prominent teeth, an immature chin.

  “What are you doing over here, Frannie?”

  “Working. Living. God, it’s a brute town, Jim. But I had to go somewhere. The Social Security was enough to get along on. It’s pretty good when you’ve got little kids. But I was just sort of dragging through every day, and so a couple of months ago I parked the kids on Ceil, bless her, and came over here.”

  Suddenly he had remembered Dick Vernon had been killed six months previously. He had worked for General Telephone as a lineman. He’d gone out after tarpon with two friends on a Sunday morning in the small cabin cruiser one of them owned, and it had blown up in the Gulf a mile off Sanibel Island. The other two, with bad flesh burns, had made it to the beach. The boat had burned to the water line and sunk. Dick’s body had been recovered the following day.

  “That was a terrible thing, about Dick,” he said.

  Tears stood in her eyes and she laughed in a mirthless way. “Look at me. One kind word and I’m off. It’s taking a long time to really believe it, Jim. So here I am, in Miami, which I guess is as good as any other place would be at the moment. I’m waiting tables at that restaurant down the block there, on the other side. Gee, it’s good to see somebody from home.”

  “I’m covering a meeting. I have to stay over, and I was about to find a place. Can I buy you a drink, Frannie? Dinner, maybe?”

  She looked thoughtful, glanced at her watch. “Sure. I guess so. But I’d like a chance to get a bath and get fixed up. You work in that place, you smell like grease all over. How about you pick me up at six-thirty?”

  She told him where it was and how to get there. He went over and checked into a motel on the north end of the beach. On the off chance, he rented better and larger accommodations than he had planned to, feeling sly and semiguilty as he did so. She was ready when he stopped for her, and she did not ask him in. She looked very good to him. She wore a sleeveless dress in a fuzzy pumpkin wool, and a beige wool coat and a pillbox hat in a paisley pattern. He took her to one of the big, quiet, shadowy restaurants on the beach, a place for food and talk. They spent a long time in the cocktail lounge. She was obviously pleased to be taken out and happy to be with him. After three drinks they talked about Dick and she wept. And after that, he told her about Gloria, about this last nightmare visit, and how, after he had taken her back, they had told him it was unlikely they would ever be able to give her visiting privileges again. He told Frannie he was looking for a buyer for their house, the home she would never see again, and did not know he was weeping until his voice clotted and he felt the tickle of tears on his face. Frannie reached out to him and closed her hand around his wrist with great strength.
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  “Please don’t, Jim, honey.”

  He looked at her with a great earnestness. “But don’t you see, the terrible thing about it is the way it’s all so phony. I’m not crying about her, Frannie. I can’t seem to cry about it as a great loss. I’m … crying about me. I’m crying at the great phony tragic figure I’m making of myself. And I think I’m crying because I want to touch your heart.”

  “Let’s eat now, Jimmy. We’ve had enough drinks. Let’s get a menu and order from here, please, and let them tell us when it’s ready, and not have any more drinks.”

  At dinner they had talked of trivial things which would not trigger either of them. Over coffee, awkward as a schoolboy, he said, elaborately, “I … uh … found a pretty nice place to stay. We could have a nightcap there and I could show you my view of the pool.”

  When she didn’t answer, he looked directly at her and saw her looking at him with an expression he could not read. Her head was tilted slightly. She looked sad, rueful, slightly ironic, but with an undertone of tenderness.

  “Yes, Jimmy. Yes, I suppose we have to go look at the pool. There’s really nothing else we can do, is there?”

  She was very quiet on the way out to the motel. They went in. He turned two subdued lights on. She threw her coat and purse on a chair, and they stood by the sliding doors and looked out at the pool. He put his hand on her waist and, after a little while, he turned her into his arms. After they had kissed with an increasing hunger, she backed away from him, sighed, smiled, took her purse and shut herself in the bathroom. He knew it would happen, and he knew it would not be very important or very good. He drew the draperies, turned out one of the lights, opened up one of the two double beds. The long fiasco of Gloria had made him jittery about all emotional relationships. He heard water running. He felt very tired. He wished he had not started it. He wished she had said no. He felt almost certain he would either be impotent, or it would all be over for him in a humiliatingly brief time. That was what had been happening to him lately.